The present invention relates to printed media production and in particular documents produced by digital printers.
With the advent of the Internet has come the opportunity for the print media industry to publish xe2x80x9con-linexe2x80x9d rather than producing and distributing traditional paper based publications. On-line publishing has a number of advantages. From the consumer""s point of view, information is available on demand, information can be navigated via hypertext links, information can be searched, and information can be automatically personalised. From the publisher""s point of view, the costs of printing and physical distribution are eliminated and the publication becomes more attractive to advertisers as it can be targeted to specific demographics and linked to product sites.
On-line publication also has disadvantages. Computer screens are inferior to paper. At the same quality as a magazine page, a SVGA computer screen displays only about a fifth as much information. Both CRT""s (Cathode Ray Tubes) and LCD""s (Liquid Crystal Displays) have brightness and contrast problems, particularly, when ambient light is strong. Ink on paper, being reflective rather than emissive is both bright and sharp in ambient light. Accordingly, people have a natural preference to read newspapers, magazines, catalogues, brochures and other publications in a bound paper based format.
Known digital printers, and in particular digital inkjet printers, do not make any provision for binding together the pages of printed media. Such an arrangement would conveniently provide for bound document production in the small office/home office (SOHO) environment. This would also permit some of the existing drawbacks of on-line publication to be addressed.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a device for printing and optionally binding pages of media, including:
a printing mechanism for printing onto separate pages of media and
a binder for binding the pages printed media, the binder adapted to apply glue to part of a page whilst another part of the page is being printed on by the printing mechanism.
Preferably the binding means adhering the pages together with glue, however, it will be appreciated that other forms of the invention include binding means for binding pages together with string or staples.
In some forms of the invention that bind rectangular pages of media using glue, the binding means is adapted to apply glue along one of the long sides of each page except the first or last page in a bound set of the pages. Of these forms, some the binding means may be adapted to apply glue to a page while the printhead is printing the page. In others, the binding means is adapted to apply glue to a page after the printhead has printed the page.
In a further preferred form, the printhead is adapted to print the full width of the page simultaneously. In one particularly preferred form, the printer is a color digital inkjet printer.
It will be appreciated that the present invention will allow the production of printed material in the traditionally appealing form of a bound document rather than separate pages. With the aid of modern printers and computer network technology, the invention has many applications in on-line publication of newspapers, magazines, brochures and so on. The present invention will be described with particular reference to the Netpage(trademark) system. An overview of this system is set out below. It has been developed to allow a large number of distributed users to interact with networked information via printed matter and optical sensors thereby to obtain interactive printed matter on demand from high-speed networked color printers.
For this purpose, the Applicant has developed a range of netpage printers. Of these, the wallprinter is designed to be wall mounted in the area where the user would normally first consume the morning news such as in the kitchen or beside the breakfast table. In light of this, it is expected that the wallprinter will be one of the most widely used of the netpage printers and therefore it will be described in detail below to illustrate one specific embodiment of the invention. However, it will be appreciated that this is merely one example of the invention, which may be embodied in many other forms.